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(Photo: AP/Pablo Martinez Monsivais) A DC streetcar travels along H Street NE in Washington, D.C., on January 27, 2015. T he long-awaited D.C. streetcars recently started trundling down Washington’s H Street NE, near the U.S. Capitol. Yet the $200 million line, which had been in the works for a full decade, has mostly been greeted with the sound of one hand clapping. Residents have complained about the slow speed of the system, the short span of the line, and the paucity of new jobs or better transit connections for the area’s African American poor. When it comes to streetcars, New York is no Washington, insists Gotham Mayor Bill de Blasio. The Big Apple, he says, would have a “ different ” approach to the $2.5 billion Brooklyn Queens Connector, a cross-borough waterfront streetcar plan. Still, a streetcar is a curious choice for New York, a city that epitomizes a “the quick and the dead” attitude toward urban commuting—getting to a final destination by the shortest, fastest route...

(Photo: AP/Atlanta Journal-Constitution/John Spink) Voters wait in line on March 1 (Super Tuesday), 2016, in Atlanta. W ith the Flint water crisis looming large in the rearview mirror, Atlanta voters went to the polls on Super Tuesday and decided to continue to levy a 1 percent sales tax on themselves to fund water and sewer system projects. The measure passed by resounding margins in Atlanta-Fulton (74 percent to 26 percent) and Atlanta-DeKalb (81 percent to 19 percent). The victory was an encouraging sign that in one major metropolitan area, voters are heeding some important lessons about the importance of continued infrastructure investments. Like many American cities, Atlanta has had to learn the hard way about the downside of years of neglect. Originally instituted in 2004 and renewed in 2008 and 2012, the sales tax extension will raise about $750 million to pay for upgrades to the city’s water and sewer systems. The levy applies to just about every purchase made within the city...

mhiran1/Creative Commons An Aerial Tram gondola in Portland, Oregon's South Waterfront. T he guffawing in the District of Columbia and Northern Virginia has stopped. A proposal to set aside one neighborhood’s long-held dream for a subway stop in favor of an option usually associated with alpine ski runs got serious traction recently when the Arlington, Virginia, County Board joined the District of Columbia City Council in agreeing to move forward on a gondola system study. Using gondolas to traverse the Potomac River has to be the quirkiest idea available to relieve congestion in one of the region’s notorious traffic bottlenecks. But the United States is far behind Europe and South America in using gondolas to cross short spans or to solve other transit woes, particularly in urban areas. Although gondola systems are often treated as fantastical ideas in a country that remains fixated on traveling by car, the technology has sparked glimmers of interest in areas like Washington, D.C.,...

(Photo: AP/Tom Lynn) Democratic presidential candidates Senator Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton walk on stage before the February 11 debate in Milwaukee. W hen the nation’s top infrastructure analysts calculate the cost of the coast-to-coast investments that the United States needs to make in the country’s highways, bridges, dams, mass transit, and water networks, they end up with a number that few minds can grasp. The American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE) recently issued its quadrennial rundown on the state of the country’s infrastructure. It is a sobering list of dollar signs. To get the country’s drinking water pipes in good working order could cost more than $1 trillion; “high hazard” dam repairs, $21 billion; major urban highways upgrades, $170 billion; deficient bridge replacements, $76 billion. Adding in mass transit, wastewater, hazardous waste disposal, aviation, and other demands means that the U.S. would have to spend an estimated $3.6 trillion by 2020 just to get...

(Photo: AP/Mike Groll) A man works on a rail bridge spanning the Hudson River as an Amtrak passenger rail passes by in December 2015 in Albany, New York. L ast fall, Amtrak implemented a new “cost-sharing policy” that significantly bumps up payments that some state transit agencies in the Northeast make to the national railroad network. The new policy aims to funnel additional funds into North America’s busiest regional passenger rail network—Amtrak’s Boston-to-Washington corridor—which is sorely in need of fresh infusions of cash to make up for decades of infrastructure disinvestment. But the Massachusetts Bay Transit Authority (MBTA), the agency that runs the metro Boston public transportation system, cried foul when Amtrak presented it with a nearly $30 million bill for its yearly share. In a January letter to outgoing Amtrak president Joseph Boardman, Massachusetts Secretary of Transportation Stephanie Pollack called Amtrak’s demands “unreasonable” and pointed to the long-term...